Hugh Latimer: a man of words and not less deeds

From time to time, I like to dip into C.S. Lewis's book English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford History of English Literature).  Here's what he says about Hugh Latimer, the greatest of the popular sort of preacher during the English Reformation.  Hugh was an English priest who converted to protestantism in 1525, was made Bishop of Worcester in 1535, and burnt at the stake in 1555.

"...there is one man of real genius still to be considered.  Hugh Latimer's character may be ambiguous or even repellent: his sermons, in their own kind, are resounding successes, 'though, to be sure, not very theological'. Latimer assents, indeed, to the doctrine of justification by faith, but he is no theologian; some of his apparent tergiversations may perhaps result from the bewilderment (even the impatience) of a 'plain man' entangled in matters above his capacity.

 

Whatever he may say (when he remembers) about faith, he is really so exclusively interested in works that not only a Papist but a Pelagian or even a good pagan could read nine-tenths of his sermons without a qualm. Nor is he a humanist: ego non calleo Graece, he professed in his final examination. He is one of the purest examples in English of the 'popular' preacher in the fullest -- if you will, the lowest -- sense of that word. He boasts himself the son of an English yeoman and works in 'the uprightly, plain Dunstable way'.  He is full of anecdotes, jibes, digression, and simple vituperation; he takes his hearers into his confidence, explains how this or that illustration came into his head, forgets himself and recalls himself: all sounds as if it were extemporaneous.

We should probably be naive if we took the style at its face value. An appearance of casualness ('I am no orator as Brutus is') is one of the rhetorician's weapons: and I suspect that everything which seems to fall by chance from Latimer's lips is consciously devised to hold the attention and undermine the resistance of the audience. He establishes intimacy with them in order to sway them. It is a well understood homiletic technique which descends to him from the Middle Ages (his method has affinities with that of Chaucer's Pardoner) and which has survived into our own days under the opprobrious names of 'straight talkism' or 'high pressure Christianity'.

Some cannot endure it. They have a right to their taste, but they must not infer from the style that Latimer is a charlatan. The spiritual cheapjack and the sincere preacher both have equal, though different, motives for wishing to arrest and control a congregation and therefore may both (if they can) adopt a manner which will certainly achieve this end. 'Young feller', said General Booth to Kipling, 'if I thought I could win one more soul to the Lord by playing the tambourine with my toes, I'd -- I'd learn how.' The only test which Latimer would admit as relevant for his sermons is their practical efficacy. And they were efficacious.

 We are told that when he preached on the duty of restitution it was not long before certain anonymous donations began to reach the king's treasury. That does not perhaps justify us in calling his work literature: but the mere strength and pith and urgency of his sentences, in that age so given to verbiage, is a literary virtue. He is as importunate as Hazlitt. He would have been a fine broadcaster."    (p. 192-194)

  Now try reading his sermon on the Armor of God.  I have to say, I love his informal style, it runs better than much 16th century writing, as I know that's the way he preached.

Jonathan Miles on the Burned-over District

Over at Midwest Christian Outreach, there's a great conclusion to a three-part series of articles on the political and philosophical origins of the culture-driven church.  Here, he talks about revivalism and the social gospel in upstate New York.  There's a range of balance that is hard to achieve in social activism... just ask Denny Hartford at Vital Signs Ministries.  It's no wonder the district in NY was called "burned-over" after all the revivals and temperance meetings.



Jonathan Miles, Revivalism in the Burned-over District part 3.

Rowan Williams on the basis for Christian ethics

Tonight at Gleaners I picked up a book by John Shelby Spong, former Anglican Bishop on New Jersey. The book was called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism. Now, reading his bio on Wikipedia, I found a link to a response by Rowan Williams, who in 1998 when the article was written was Bishop of Monmouth, and now is Archbishop of Canterbury. Williams was responding to Spong's "12 theses" or statements of how the basic truths of Christianity must change or die. I always hated Rowan Williams because he ordained Gene Robinson a bishop even though he practices homosexuality. But hear him out here. Some real pastoral advice to Spong's radical unbelief.

Rowan Williams, "No Life Here - No Joy, Terror or Tears." Church Times (The Tasmanian Anglican) July 17, 1998.

Of course, if you want to misunderstand Darwin as establishing a narrative of steady spiritual or intellectual evolution, you will indeed want to say that all existing ethical standards are relative. How, then, are you going to deal with claims by this or that group that they are moving on to the next evolutionary stage? In what sense can ethics fail to be about the contests of power, if there is nothing to which we are all answerable at all times?

Of course the parameters of ethical understanding shift: but the shifts in Christian ethics on, for example, slavery, usury and contraception, have had to argue long and hard to establish that they are in some way drawing out an entailment of what is there, or honouring some fundamental principle in what is there. In other words, these changes in convention have had to show a responsibility to certain principles that continue to identify this kind of talk as still recognisably Christian talk.

It makes for hard work - as is obvious with current debates about homosexuality or nuclear war; but it is hard work because of the need to continue listening to what is said and written.

But then we discover in Spong's theses that there is, after all, a non-negotiable principle, based upon the image of God in human beings. Admirable; but what does it mean in Spong's theological world? What is the image of a 'non-theistic' God? And where, for goodness' sake, does he derive this belief about humans? It is neither scientific nor obvious.

It is, in fact, what we used to call a dogma of revealed religion. It is a painful example of the sheerly sentimental use of phraseology whose rationale depends upon a theology that is being overtly rejected. What can it be more than a rather unfairly freighted and emotive substitute for some kind of bland egalitarianism - bland because ungrounded and therefore desperately vulnerable to corruption, or defeat at the hands of a more robust ideology? It is impossible to think too often of the collapse of liberalism in 1930s Germany.

It is no great pleasure to write so negatively about a colleague from whom I, like many others, have learned. But I cannot in any way see Bishop Spong's theses as representing a defensible or even an interesting Christian future. And I want to know whether the Christian past scripture and tradition, really appears to him as empty and sterile as this text suggests.

It seems he has not found life here, and that is painful to acknowledge and to hear. Yet I see no life in what the theses suggest; nothing to educate us into talking about the Christian God in a way I can recognise: no incarnation; no adoption into intimate relation with the Source of all; no Holy Spirit. No terror. No tears.

Does he know that generations of believers have argued the need to separate hope for life after death from earthly rewards and punishments? They believe that the present and future delight of enjoying God's intimacy made all such talk irrelevant.

Does he see at all that the recognition of God's image in everyone, in such a way as to drive people to risk everything for it (Wilberforce? Dorothy Day? Desmond Tutu? Bonhoeffer? Romero?), seems persistently to come from an immersion in the dark reality of God's difference and in the uncompromising paradoxes of incarnation of the Almighty?